The Fork Versus Fate
by Jyulin
Summary: What if Daniel had released the symbiote poison in "Summit"?
1. Chapter 1

_The journey is determined by the paths taken at the forks in the road. But fate offers its small but compelling suggestions in there somewhere as well._

* * *

It was unfair. There was no other way to describe it. No floral imagery or padding. No way to place it gently. No other word could quite describe it (although 'unreasonable' or 'just plain ridiculous' came pretty close). It was as simple as that.

SG-1 had been through hell and back, saving the planet, galaxy, universe, space-time continuum, themselves et cetera and had always returned...sometimes in more pieces than what they left in, but returned nonetheless. They'd always lived to save the world another day.

So why then, were all of their efforts in four-and-a-bit years reduced to a split second in time?

Why was all the technology they'd worked so hard to acquire rendered useless with a single five-centimeter long canister?

And why did the fate of the universe rest within the twitch of a finger?

* * *

He pressed the button.

And that was it. Daniel could feel the gas leaking into the room. He desperately stared at the person who he had once known as Sarah in the futile hope that he might catch her eye one last time before she realized he'd killed her. But, unaware of what he had just done, Osiris ignorantly continued to address the System Lords.

"I am here to represent the vote of another," she stated holding her head high.

_**What.**_

Daniel felt the blood rush to his ears. What had she just said? He was sure he heard her, but she couldn't have said what he thought she said. Could she?

"Who do you serve?" demanded Lord Yu.

The gas continued to diffuse from his side of the room. By some miracle, the Goa'uld had not yet fallen victim to its affects. Something inside him felt like jumping up and down like an idiot waving a baking tray to try to rid the room of symbiote poison before the majority of the people in the room dropped dead. He somehow managed to refrain. Just barely.

"Anubis!" retorted Osiris, tilting her head to one side.

If Daniel, at any stage, had bad feelings of what these last three sentences meant, they were about to get ten times worse. The reaction of the System Lords was that of pure shock. Many of them had several things to say on such a topic, but none of them ever had the chance. The poison had crept around enough. Suddenly, there were eight choking Goa'uld, then eight bodies falling to the floor. Then silence. Daniel glanced at the other lo'taurs. They were understandably in a severe form of numbing surprise - eight 'Gods' dead in one day?

Daniel was the first one to move. He checked for a pulse on Lord Yu; the other lo'taurs did similar things.

"Which one of you is responsible for this?" bellowed Ba'al's lo'taur suddenly.

Uh-oh. Time to go.

As subtly as he could, Daniel made his way across the room. He made it to the door unnoticed - all hell had broken loose. The remaining lo'taurs had begun battling one another while conducting reasonably loud arguments.

As soon as he was clear of the meeting chamber, he drew the Tok'ra communicator. "Jacob!" he called, still walking down the hall. "Get me out of here!"

It seemed that the Tok'ra could hear the commotion in the background, and thus did not ask any questions until Daniel was already on the ship again.

"How did it go?"

Daniel hung his head. "Not so good, I think."

"You mean you didn't actually release the poison?" growled Jacob. "Dammit Daniel..."

"I released the poison."

"Then what's the problem?"

"Sarah said she was representing the vote of another Goa'uld - Anubis."

"Anubis?" Jacob shook his head. "It can't be. He's dead."

"Apparently he isn't. He wanted to rejoin the System Lords."

"He was banished over a thousand years ago for crimes that were unspeakable - even for the Goa'uld," said the Tok'ra vacantly. "And we just..."

"Opened up the way for him to rule the whole galaxy," finished Daniel. "Oh God." He looked over to his friend. "Jacob, what have I done?"

* * *

The journey back to Revanna was very close to being completely silent. Jacob and Daniel both kept their eyes straight ahead and their mouths closed. The first time either one of them moved other than out of necessity was when they arrived at their destination. They dropped out of hyperspace, immediately cloaking the cargo ship.

A beeping noise sounded - they were receiving a communication. Jacob pressed the appropriate buttons and translated.

"We're being warned away from Revanna," he said, furrowing his brow in confusion.

"Why?" Daniel wanted to know, but he feared he already knew the answer.

"I'm not sure. A warning is programmed to activate in the event that several things go wrong - Goa'uld invasion, among others..." He looked at the dashboard. "We should go."

The archaeologist's eyes shifted. "Hey, wait. What about Sam, Jack and Teal'c? They're probably still down there."

"Daniel, Tok'ra protocol indicates that we should assume no survivors."

"Yes, well, I'm not a Tok'ra." Daniel was bordering 'beyond reason' with worry.

Jacob's eyes widened slightly, instilling no confidence in Daniel's hopes. "Sensors are picking up _over_ five thousand major life signs down there." He sighed, knowing what this likely meant. He turned to explain, regret etched in his features. "We didn't have that many Tok'ra on the base, Daniel. As much as I would like to think that they..."

There was a crash and a shudder as something impacted the Cargo ship.

"We're picking up two gliders closing on our position," reported Jacob, his Earth military training kicking in.

Daniel's head slumped forward. "We should go," he agreed as the ship clanged, and Jacob took them into hyperspace once more.

TBC

* * *


	2. Chapter 2

Sam jerked back into reality, her heart beating hard in her chest. Briefly, she raised her hand to her face to wipe away the icky red stuff sliding down it. She looked down at Major Mansfield, whom she had been shielding when the tunnel caved in. He was dead. She pulled off his dogtags and stowed them in her vest pocket for when she arrived back at the SGC..._if_ she returned.

She rose unsteadily to her feet and looked at the debris around her. Bodies were strewn at various intervals of the ruined lab. Dust was still raining down from the ceiling. Chunks of rock lay indiscriminately on person and floor alike. Glass pieces were semi floating in a shallow pool of water...

Wait. Glass. Water.

Lantash.

Her gaze quickly shifted to the bench. The symbiote was no longer in its glass tank. Sam looked around, half of her desperately trying to find it while the other half desperately hoping not to. As she circled the table, she found what she was half-searching for. Lantash lay amongst broken glass, lifeless. The last remaining remnant of Martouf was gone.

Releasing a sigh to control herself, she searched for _any_ signs of life. There were none. She was alone.

Kneeling beside Ren'al, Sam acquired the formula for the symbiote poison, hoping that she could survive long enough to either destroy it or synthesize more.

The base shook as the surface was once more bombarded. Sam covered her head and ducked low until it passed. Pulling herself from out of her makeshift shield, she looked around for any other SGC personnel.

She found Elliot just outside in the hallway, and she knelt to check his pulse. She'd been hardly expecting to find one, but she couldn't help the wave of disappointment that rushed over her as she confirmed her suspicions. He was dead. Sam couldn't help but feel immensely guilty and more than partly responsible. His first mission! He had been killed in action on his first mission. Where was the justice in that? He'd been looking forward to going offworld, and then when he finally did it, he could never go again. In a similar fashion to Major Mansfield, Sam pulled off Elliot's dogtags. She hung her head for a second before moving off. She could do nothing for them now.

Sam spared half a thought for Teal'c and Colonel O'Neill. She hoped they were on the surface, which was maybe, just maybe, a tiny bit safer than down here. She didn't allow herself to dwell on these thoughts long, not wanting to feed the fires of what could ultimately prove to be false hopes.

Suddenly, there was another loud explosion. But this one seemed different. The entire place shook with the impact, and Sam felt herself grabbing onto the wall in order to keep her balance. Newly-formed debris scattered the hall outside the lab.

After coming across the eighth or ninth body in the hallway, Sam felt compelled to address the two pieces of her mind warring inside her skull. One told her to evacuate now; that there were probably no survivors and she should save herself, relaying the symbiote poison formula to Earth. The other told her to wait it out. Surely there had to be someone left! Either way, she figured she didn't have much time.

Or perhaps she didn't have any.

Any thought patterns along these lines were swiftly ended as the sound of rubble moving and footsteps caught her attention. Her ears twitched sensitively. Whoever was there, they were moving lightly and were reasonably stealthy. Sam pulled herself to a sudden stop, listening harder. As she stopped, however, whoever was around the corner stopped too: they could hear her as well as she could hear them. The dull droning sound of sudden silence rung in her ears. She darted around the corner, raising her weapon and her finger readily poised over the trigger - anybody she encountered was very liable to be shot at this stage. The problem was, as soon as she had revealed one inch of herself, she found she was staring down the barrel of a gun herself. Sam's eyes widened and a gasp escaped her lips before she recognized exactly what she was looking at.

It was a P-90. Colonel O'Neill. She practically dropped her own weapon out of pure relief - half from finding him alive, half for not shooting him.

"Carter!" he growled, lowering his weapon and a little on edge. "Are you alright?"

"Yes, sir," she replied, nodding. "You and Teal'c?"

"We're fine." Right on cue, Teal'c walked around a bend further down the tunnel. "Where is SG-15?"

Sam bit her lip. Colonel O'Neill didn't need to have studied human psychology to understand what that meant. The place around them shook with the force of another bombing.

"What do you say we bust out of this place, huh?" suggested the Colonel.

"Indeed," replied Teal'c, hefting his staff weapon. "We must exit via the rings. This way."

Alert, the three of them made their way to the rings.

They reached the end of the corridor quickly - too quickly. Rubble blocked their way. "Uh, Teal'c?" said O'Neill. "_Tell_ me that the rings weren't down there."

"If I were to say such a thing, it would be an utter fabrication," said Teal'c. "The rings were, in fact, in that direction." He gestured at the debris.

"Ay," breathed O'Neill. "Know any other way around?"

Sam nodded. "Through the lab."

They turned and began to double back, feeling anxious at the thought of all the time they had wasted. However, they were unopposed on their journey back.

Something about the place didn't quite sit right with Sam. Sure, there had been several people killed in here just today, and sure, she was struggling to stem the impending wave of panic that threatened to overwhelm her, but something seemed...different. She carefully chose her steps through the ruined place, avaoiding bits of crystal and blood stains.

It was that moment that it occurred to her.

She froze. "Sir, there's no bodies."

While keeping quiet would not have boded well for them, saying anything had been a mistake as well. She had been heard. There was the unmistakable clinking of armour; heavy, solid footfalls of men snapping to attention; orders shouted; staff weapons powered.

They turn and ran for all they were worth. Balls of superheated plasma brushed past them, sometimes missing them only by a hair's width. The Jaffa were too close behind for them to turn and fight, so they just kept running. The rings couldn't be too far off now.

Sam darted around another bend. She took a millisecond to glace behind; O'Neill and Teal'c were still at her heels.

It felt like something out of a cartoon. The moment she turned back to face where she was going, she hit a semi-solid object and rebounded, falling to the floor. Teal'c used the count she was down to shoot the semi-solid object - a Jaffa - and others that were of fast approach. O'Neill had raised his P-90 and had joined the fighting.

There were two significant shots fired, followed closely behind by two groans and bodies falling. Sam looked around, considering trying to shoot her way out. But she knew it wouldn't do any good. Jaffa surrounded them. O'Neill and Teal'c were already unconscious from zatn'k'tel blasts, and she didn't feel like playing with their lives by resisting too harshly.

Sam raised her hands in a peaceful-ish gesture.

_I surrender._

The first prime raised the zatn'k'tel, and fired. Sam fell to the ground as she was confronted with blackness.


	3. Chapter 3

Thanks to everybody who's read so far. :D

Also, if anybody has any suggestions for a new title, I'd be glad to hear them. I daresay this story desperately needs a new one. n.n;

* * *

Daniel wandered down the hall leading to General Hammond's office. After knocking on the door, he was summoned in to sit down.

"No, sir," said the General to whoever it was that happened to be on the other end of the phone. "Actually, sir, we know very little about him. Any other surviving Tok'ra have yet to contact us with any new information - they're still on the run since their base was infiltrated. As soon as I know, you'll know sir." With that, he replaced the red handset on its receiver.

"I take it you haven't heard anything yet," said Daniel, looking at his fingers which had miraculously become interesting.

Hammond shook his head. "I'm afraid not, son."

"There _has_ to be something we can do."

"Until we have intelligence, we're at a loss to do anything."

Daniel couldn't think of anything to say. That was about an hour's worth of mustered courage used up in a minute and a half. He sighed. The General no doubt had some sort of work to do. Daniel went to leave.

"Dr. Jackson," Hammond called, just before he made it to the exit. "Jacob told me the full story while you were having your post-mission check up. I know you must be feeling somewhat responsible, but..."

"You don't understand. It _was_ my fault. If hadn't pushed that button, we'd know about a formidable enemy. Sarah would still be alive. We might have found Jack, Sam and Teal'c on Revanna. Hell, we could have helped them escape with the symbiote poison, for all I know. It _is_ my fault."

"Dr. Jackson, we sent a MALP to the planet after you returned. The Goa'uld had left. They must have found what they were looking for, or been forced to leave somehow."

"And Jack, Sam and Teal'c could have been responsible for any of that..." He thought for a second. "..for better, or for worse."

Hammond shook his head sympathetically. "I'm sorry, Dr. Jackson. We've alerted all teams to keep an eye out and we'll keep looking, but there's really nothing more we can do."

Daniel felt his heart plummet, and nothing he thought of seemed worthwhile enough to say aloud. He walked out of the room and down the corridor.

The base alarm started blaring.

_Incoming traveler._

Daniel felt like somebody had just punctured his ear drum with a leucotome. He turned on his heel and headed to the control room.

"Who is it?" Daniel demanded of Walter Harriman upon his arrival.

The sergeant seemed unconcerned. "It's the Tok'ra, sir," he replied dutifully.

General Hammond jogged down the last couple of stairs. "Open the iris," he ordered.

The iris shrunk back and Jacob Carter stepped through. As per usual, his stride was solid and purposeful - this clearly was no courtesy call. Hammond stepped down to the 'gate room, Daniel at his heels.

"George, we have a serious-"

"Briefing room."

The briefing room felt so empty. It was as if he could call his name and it would bounce off the walls to arrive back at his ears again, as if he stepped too far inside he'd shrink into some sort of massive hole that would magically appear at his feet. It was meant for more than three people. It was meant for a leader, an archaeologist, an astrophysicist, a warrior and a slightly immature...whatever Jack was.

But he missed them already. Even Jack's paper wasps.

Daniel sat in his usual spot - two seats from General Hammond at the head of the briefing room table. Both Jacob and the good General looked at him strangely, but he ignored them.

Jacob took less than a moment to understand what Daniel was doing - and the same amount of time to sympathize. "Earth is in danger. Me and Daniel need to leave immediately."

"What's going on?"

"In the last two days, we tried to hastily infiltrate an operative into Anubis' ranks," explained the Tok'ra. "It didn't go very well, but we've learned that he's put into practice a plan that'll effectively wipe out all life on Earth."

Daniel let his eyelids drop closed. Yet another product of his error. "How?"

"That's the thing." An ironic smile stretched itself across Jacob's face. "We don't know. Our operative managed only to communicate that to us before they were caught."

"So we know something's going to happen, but we don't know what?" Hammond's voice had an edge to it, as if the shock he was probably feeling was channeled into the irritation in his vocal patterns.

"Well, given what Anubis' been doing lately, the first thing I'd be doing is running a very sensitive scan of deep space if I were you," advised Jacob.

Hammond nodded once, before he pushed himself out of his seat and headed down the stairs, barking the necessary orders at the appropriate people.

"How long until any of the results come through, Walter?" asked Daniel as he jumped down the stairs to the control room, Jacob not far behind.

"I'm not sure, sir," replied the technician. "I'm sure I don't need to tell you that space is...big. And doing a detailed scan will be more time consuming."

"Let us know the moment you find _anything_ out of the ordinary," instructed Jacob. "I don't care if looks like space debris or Superman or the _Enterprise_. If it's not usually there, yell." He turned to leave.

"Uh, sir," said Harriman uncertainly. He stared at the screen. There was a blurred image there. "_That_ wasn't there."

"We found something already?" Daniel leant forward to try to see the object better. "What is it?"

"Can you clear it up a bit, Sergeant?" asked Hammond.

"'Fraid not, sir," said Harriman. "But, with a couple of hours of satellite observation, we could dig up a few more details."

"Do it."

Questions sprung to Daniel's mind. Was the blur on the screen really the harbinger of doom for Earth, or had they picked up something that was just wasting the valuable time that they could be using to keep searching? If it was, what was it designed to do? And more importantly, could they stop it?

Daniel left the control room, the unwelcome wave of helplessness lapping at his heels.

TBC


End file.
